Back in mid-April – how long ago it seems! – I recall seeing a picture that circulated on the Internet, courtesy of a group called Les Justiciers masqués. The picture showed Jean Charest in the guise of Adolf Hitler, complete with a thin moustache and a German officer’s hat. Patrick Lagacé, a columnist for La Presse, didn’t find the picture amusing at all. As he wisely observed, to invoke Hitler, the Third Reich or indeed any Nazi iconography in a political argument today “is always excessive. Nothing, or almost nothing, approaches the madness of Hitler. Certainly not the position of the Liberal government of Quebec in 2012.” His remarks landed Lagacé in a “tweetfight” – a young expression in both official languages. Tweetfights are slanging matches on Twitter. Ah, the joys of progress.

Six weeks later, Lagacé returned to the topic with a sombre article in which he deplored, among other things, how “the word fascism has made a triumphant return onto the public stage.” As they march through the streets of Montreal, many protesters have been shouting a rhyming, profane chant that denounces both Charest and Bill 78, the government’s attempt to end the student unrest, as fascist. Unjust the law may be; fascist it is not. Neither are the police, although they too have been labelled fascist by some demonstrators. A Radio-Canada report from Rimouski last weekend went so far as to speak of “the totalitarian character of Bill 78.”

But not all the overheated rhetoric comes from the mouths of students and their sympathizers. Commentators appalled by the turbulence in Quebec have deployed slogans and images that do them no credit either. On the Sun News Network, for instance, Ezra Levant repeatedly described the most radical protesters as terrorists. As he spoke, a banner displayed the words: “Terrorists posing as students wreak havoc in Montreal.” Levant called the students who unleashed smoke devices in the métro “Montreal subway bombers,” and he referred to the relatively modest charges against them as “yet another example of appeasement.” Ever since 1938, when Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement allowing Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia, “appeasement” has been a loaded word.

Judging by the comments on news websites, the commonest way to insult the students is to disparage them as cosseted children. An article on the CTV News website provoked dozens of furious responses, of which the following are typical: “Get a job, you elitist little piggies.” “What a bunch of spoiled kids.” “You babies have NO credibility.” “Ah, Quebec: home of radical-leftist spoiled-brat parasites.” One responder, evidently trapped in a time warp, complained about “these trouble-making hippies”; but far more of the outraged readers saw the students as juvenile delinquents in need of stern punishment.

To its credit, The Gazette has avoided much of the inflamed rhetoric that now characterizes comment about Quebec elsewhere in the country. Insults can make a writer or speaker feel momentarily better; they satisfy readers or listeners who already share the insulter’s opinion. But, apart from this, they accomplish nothing. Shakespeare’s plays are packed with wonderfully poetic insults (“Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter!”); but while such lines may delight spectators, they don’t change any of the characters’ minds. I think journalists who resort to insult – and I have occasionally been guilty myself – show a lack of respect for their audience as well as for the targets of their invective. A generation ago, readers and listeners might have muttered private oaths under their breath; now they can easily unleash their rage in public, online. And so we live, nearly all of us, bombarded by scorn.

One way or another, we’ll emerge from this crisis. But when social peace returns to Quebec, and to Canada as a whole, it will need to be accompanied by tolerance – not just of different habits, faiths and sexualities, but of different opinions too. Calling your political enemies fascists, or dismissing them as children or terrorists, adds toxic fuel to the fire.

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